Atonement and Law: Anselm, Girard, Rose and Wright

A public lecture by Giles Fraser which brings together a fascinating group of thinkers on atonement (that is, the Christian doctrine of salvation), and its relationship to ‘the law’. St Anselm of Canterbury, in the eleventh century, wrote of Christ, the God-man, making ‘satisfaction’ to God for human sinfulness, when no other human being was capable of doing so. His account of salvation was enormously influential on theology for the next thousand years. Three modern thinkers explore this difficult territory from contemporary perspectives: the French American cultural anthropologist René Girard, has written extensively on religion and ‘scapegoating’ violence; the late Gillian Rose, a Jewish political philosopher who converted to Christianity at the end of her life, wrote on Hegel and the agonising separation of law from ethics; and Right Rev. Professor Tom Wright, is noted for his immense and significant contribution to the ‘new scholarship’ on St. Paul.

Taken together, the insights of these figures point towards a solution of some of the most pressing questions facing modern Christian believers, about how we are to think in a credible way about God's dealings with humanity. Giles Fraser is priest-in-charge at St Mary's Newington in south London and writes the ‘Loose Canon’ column for the Guardian. He is the former canon chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral and author of Christianity and Violence: Girard, Nietzsche, Anselm and Tutu (DLT, London, 2001)